Rohingyas are ‘friendless’ because they have nothing to offer

Myanmar government maintains that Rohingyas are Bengalis. Some Bengalis also claim that Rohingyas are Bengalis while Rohingyas say that Rohingyas are Rohingyas.

Rohingyas appear to be particularly friendless, especially among those who matter and not Erdogan type neo-fascist Ottomans who want to project a sort of leadership position in the Sunni “Ummah” by public acts of benevolence through relief giving photo-ops of his wife and an offer of building one lakh shelters. It is cynical but apart from Bangladesh, that’s huge and at this point, everything counts – even aid from USA and India.

The so-called Sunni “Ummah” does not treat brown Muslims as equal human beings, so naturally, the great defenders of the two holy sites of Islam are busy devastating Yemen and have not made any offer to provide refuge to fleeing Rohingyas or even the Muslims among the Rohingyas.

China has sided with Myanmar government. USA seems unmoved by their plight. The Indian Union has sent token relief to Bangladesh but has proclaimed Rohingyas inside the Indian Union as illegal immigrants and not refugees and has instructed its Border Security Forces to confront Rohingyas with pepper spray.

It is sick but that is to be expected from a government at New Delhi that is driven by Hindi-Hindu-Hindustan ideology. In many ways, this reflects the sad reality of a post-Cold War unipolar world where effective multi-polarity is still more theoretical than real. The Soviet Empire, with all its ills, was an effective check against unipolarity of the American empire. Thus, when a flashpoint happened, or a huge humanitarian crisis happened, if one of them sided with the perpetrators, the other sided with the victims.

Rohingyas have little to offer to China, India

Rohingyas today are friendless largely due to the loss of that global, political balance. China has had a long-standing relationship with Myanmar during its wilderness years- thus acquiring mineral resources, mineral exploration rights and crucial infrastcuture, including a port and pipeline project that will enable oil supplies to come from the Gulf to China bypassing the straits of Malacca.

The Indian Union is playing a make-up game for the benefit of its own big business who bankrolled BJP’s rise to power in 2014. It’s payback time. There are projects in Myanmar for Delhi to grab and handout to these big biz and some such projects are already in place. There is nothing that Rohingyas offer to anyone in any cynical cost benefit analysis. Bangladesh, a very poor state, is left holding the bag and the refugees on its own land that already has the highest density of population in a proportionate landmass.

In this context, the enthusiasm and solidarity of pan-Islamists of all hues, from the benign to outright genocide supporters of Bangladesh 1971, have been the biggest impediment for non-Muslim solidarity, especially among non-Muslims in the Indian Union and the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. If these pan-Islamists were actually interested about the plight of Rohingyas, rather than using their images of real Rohingya plight and in many cases manufacturing fake images of Rohingya plight, they would have desisted from playing sectarian political games in their own domestic context. But that moment is over.

The reality of Islamic solidarity

From the moment the Rohingya crisis erupted, “Islamic” solidarity erupted too with full vigour and it asked the question “Are Rohingya Muslims not humans?” without any irony. Such is the strength of this narrative that even the Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina mentioned in the Bangladesh Parliament about the Muslim aspect of Rohingyas.

As it turns out, most Rohingyas are Muslims but all Rohingyas are not Muslims. Many of the Hindu Rohingyas are also among the refugees and disturbing reports have emerged from TV media in Bangladesh about Hindu Rohingya refugees being raped and tortured in Rohingya camps. Additionally, BBC has reported a mass grave of Hindu Rohingyas, mostly female. Though not independently verifiable, the Myanmar Army has claimed that this is the work of Muslim Rohingya insurgents, whose coordinated attacks on Myanmar Army outposts triggered the chain of events leading to the brutal campaign of the Myanmar Army that caused the mass exodus.

Reality is always more complicated than narratives that emerge out of it. Otherwise, this subcontinent would not have produced so many Muslims who believe that Hindus are the worst type of human beings and so many Hindus who believe that Muslims are the worst type of human beings. In such contested times, the Rohingya issue becomes a ‘Muslim’ humanitarian issue and Erdogan becomes neo-Suleiman, the magnificent.

Sheikh Hasina’s ‘Muslim’ card

But one must try to understand why Sheikh Hasina too had to underline the “Muslim” bit when she meant Rohingya. There is a context.

The Islamists of the opposition, including those who opposed the independence of Bangladesh, have charged the ruling party with “minority appeasement”. Minority appeasement is a charge that is always stuck to anyone who does not seem to actively promote hatred towards the communal ‘Other’ in this subcontinent made up of byproducts of a communal Partition.

Dhaka has responded way beyond its means in this human disaster. The official but tacit Bengali nationalist understanding works at the relief camp level – the strong promotion of contraception among the hugely contraception unaccustomed Rohingyas. The message that emanates to the Rohingyas from this understanding is- “Refuge is okay for now, we would ideally want all of you to go and while you are here, we do not want you to increase in number in comparison to us who increase in much lower rates).

Islamists have not lost an opportunity to spin the situation in accordance with their own divisive agenda through this issue and that has become one of the main, if not the main, narrative of why the Rohingya issue concerns Bangladesh. The reason is Muslim-Muslim solidarity. And that brings in a very fertile ground of a most hateful form of Islamic terrorism. And that association makes most governments very wary from getting associated (if being resource-less, poor, brown people without a state with its biggest neighbours hardly rushing to rescue altogether is not already bad enough).

My friend and noted columnist Sarwar Jahan Chowdhury of Dhaka sums this up succinctly, “The beastly Islamist radicals and terrorists have brought so much bad name for the Muslims that even on a genuine and dire case of persecution of ordinary Muslims, the latter fail to draw appropriate empathy and necessary supportive action from the rest of the world.”

Only fools would believe that governing principle of White people’s charity money flow is just human compassion, not prejudiced ideology. A more acceptable veneer has been attempted on this by claiming Rohingyas to be Bengalis and hence it is one of national solidarity but that doesn’t cut much ice since Rohingyas themselves do not say they are Bengalis. They say they are Rohingyas.

Faith-based solidarity

When solidarity becomes faith based, the lens through which the perpetrators of violence against Rohingyas is viewed is coloured by that. Thus, the Buddhist becomes the perpetrator. No doubt hate-filled political Buddhism in Myanmar is part of the ideological frame, which makes this sort of ethnic cleansing possible. But then the response widens. There have been cases when some Buddhists of Bangladesh have been harassed and threatened by some Muslims, as revenge for Rohingyas.

Thus, the action of the majority Buddhist Burmese does not help the case of the minority Buddhist citizens of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, a community already at the receiving end of attacks and destruction of Buddhist places of worship in Bangladesh. And it is also simultaneously true that for some CHT Buddhists, this is akin to the long awaited ‘Gujarat silent support’ of some Hindu Bengalis of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh – a rare celebrated moment of counterpunch for all the punches they have received in the hands of Muslims, Urdu and Bengali, in East Bengal-East Pakistan-People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

Nothing could be sadder than this – that of victims of hate united with perpetrators of hate. That is a moment of dehumanisation. The Muslim reference of Sheikh Hasina was probably avoidable, given this complex context in her own country.

(The author is an academic and commentator based in Kolkata)